Sun's starting to phase out mobile Java that's been the standard on cellphones and other small devices in favor of their standard edition, which are made for PCs everywhere. Sun VP James Gosling's reasoning for shifting everyone over to Java Standard Edition is because 'cellphones and TV set-top boxes are growing up', meaning they're getting enough processing power to handle all the demands of full-featured Java.

It does. Recently, I had to make a little clean-up on some of our machines here at work and found lots of entries for different versions of the JRE on the "Add/Remove Programs" applet in the Control Panel. I scratched the back of my head for a moment and then removed the old ones... And yes, it still worked properly afterwards!

Yes, it seems that the JRE Updates install full versions
so they can be independently removed. I've seen as many as 11 different Sun JREs installed.
In a few cases, older versions, as far back as ver 1.3 are needed to support apps that won't work reliably with anything newer but, for a ( growing ) handful of users, once Java errors start happening, nothing but a re-imaging will resolve the problem.
So, I was hoping that someone could recommend an alternative JVM with in IE browser plug-in. ( Regrettably , some of the organisation's intranet sites don't work properly with Firefox or Opera )